Love Is Blind: UK’s Faye wakes up the morning after her 29th birthday to find she’s alone in the London apartment she shares with her fiancé, Jack. It doesn’t take her long to realize Jack’s location is turned off — and she has no idea where he went. “He’s literally vanished,” Faye says.
When Faye finally hears back from him, Jack can’t explain why he wasn’t appearing on the Find My Friends app, where he went for nearly three hours, or how he got so far from their apartment, especially in flip-flops. The rest of the day is devoted to tense conversations around trust, communication, and the question on Faye’s — and everyone’s — mind: “Where the hell did Jack go?”
So what really happened between the couple, why did Jack disappear, and how did they navigate the chaos just 16 days away from their wedding? Keep reading to hear from both Jack and Faye before their story unfolds at the Season 3 reunion, which will be released on Aug. 30.
“We had an after-party at our flat. Very silly of us, knowing my parents were coming the next morning. But, as a group, we love to party, have some fun,” Faye tells Tudum. The last guest didn’t leave til dawn. “At this point, I’d already passed out on the bed on top of the covers, fully dressed,” she adds.
While Faye slept, however, Jack began to spiral. With a rising sense of panic at the thought of sitting down with Faye’s parents in a few short hours, he started to feel trapped. Sure, he’d technically met them at the birthday party, but this felt different.
“At this point, I started panicking and stressing about meeting Faye’s parents properly and being back on camera again,” he says, when asked what led him to leave the apartment that morning. “It felt like the walls were closing in on me. I needed to get out, disconnect, and just have some time by myself. ”
A self-described “beach bum” from a small town in Cornwall, Jack was overwhelmed by the city, the experiment, and everything it was leading up to. “In Canary Wharf, I’m in this glass box, 43 stories up in the air,” he says. “Can’t relax there. Go out to get fresh air and there are skyscrapers everywhere. There are cars, police cars, people. I’m walking along just stressing myself out.”
As an early riser, he was out most mornings before Faye woke, whether going to buy groceries for breakfast or hitting the gym. “I thought nothing of it,” he reflects. Jack turned his phone off and walked up the Thames for a while before turning inland, hoping to sober up a bit at a shop. After about an hour and a half, he sat down on a bench and turned his phone back on. That’s when the messages from Faye started rolling in.
“Faye is worried sick, and I get this overwhelming feeling of guilt about how I let her down,” he says. “I wasn’t used to having somebody there who cares that much about me.”
Before joining the experiment, Jack had spent the previous two years single and was unaccustomed to having anyone keep tabs on him. Now, Jack says he’s more aware of the impact he can have on his partner. “Just seeing how one selfish decision in your mind can affect somebody. ... And that’s the only way I can describe it,” he says. “It was selfish. I was looking after number one.”
As for his location tracking, Jack is just as confused as to why it didn’t work. If he had to guess, it was because his phone was turned off. “It was a classic ADHD heat-of-the-moment decision,” he says. “I’ve just gone out and gone, turned everything off on my phone. I’ve disconnected.”
He regrets how he handled the conversation with Faye and her parents when he returned. Operating on zero sleep, Jack was defensive and didn’t show up with a bouquet of lilies and an apology, as Faye’s dad had hoped. Instead, Jack pushed back, pointing to Faye’s lack of trust in him as the problem rather than the lack of communication on his end.
“Do you think he was telling the truth about where he was?” Faye’s mom asks her before Jack joins them. “You can’t go into a marriage not trusting somebody… You have to be sure that there’s no deceit or lies.”
By the end of the day, Jack was ready to be honest about his mistake.
“If I could turn back time and drop you a text that I was going for a walk, I wish I had,” Jack says to Faye in Episode 8. “You mean everything to me. I never want to see this look on your face again. I’m sorry.”
He wants to promise he’ll never let Faye down again, but he knows that’s impossible. “Because I’m an idiot,” he says to her. “But I’ve got a big heart, and you’ve got that in your hands. And you’ll have that forever.”
Will Jack’s big heart and well-meaning words be enough for Faye to say “I do”? Or will his inconsistencies and proclivity for wearing flip-flops seed too much doubt in Faye’s mind to walk down the aisle? Watch the final episodes of Love Is Blind: UK Season 3 on Wednesday, Aug. 26, to find out.
